Attention and executive functions are affected by demographic factors. The study presented in this paper examines the effects of education, gender, and age on the scores of the Color Trail Test (CTT) (D'Elia, Satz, Uchiyama, & White, 1999) and the Visual Verbal Test (VVT) (Feldman & Drasgow, 1959), which are considered to be measures of executive functions such as attention, cognitive flexibility, set shifting, abstraction, and concept formation. This paper also presents the normative data for 611 cognitively intact adult Turkish participants (male:female ratio = 361:250; age range = 20-100 years, mean age = 52.038; education range = 0-25 years, mean education = 9.01). As expected, the effects of age and education were significant and sizeable, but the effect of gender was small. Results showed that the CTT and the VVT performances were lower for higher ages and lower educational levels. Based on these results, the current norms for both tests were stratified for age and education.

The Three Words-Three Shapes (3W3S) test is a measure of verbal and nonverbal material in the same modality. It was originally designed as an easy bedside test for elderly patients to measure learning, memory, recall and recognition. This paper is based on a study that has adapted a shorter version of that test to the Turkish language and produced a set of normative data derived from a sample of 236 healthy adults (age 50-100). The purpose of the study was to investigate the influence of age, gender and education on the participants' performances on 3W3S. According to linear regression results, both education and age explained significant and sizable portions of variances on most of the 3W3S subscale test scores.

Amaç: Üç Kelime-Üç Şekil testi, klinik uygulamalarda kullanmaya uygun bir bellek ve öğrenme testidir. Sözel ve sözel olmayan materyalleri aynı yöntemle değerlendirmeye izin verir. Özellikle dejeneratif hastalıklarda (Alzheimer veya Parkinson tipi demans, primer ilerleyici afazi vb.) ilerlemenin takip edilmesi gerektiği durumlarda, bir hastada belirli aralıklarla nöropsikolojik değerlendirmeler tekrar edilebileceği için, testin paralel formu da bulunmalıdır. Testin asıl formu için normatif veriler bulunmasına rağmen, paralel formunun eşdeğerliği hakkında veri bulunmaması testin güvenilirliğini azaltmaktadır. Bu nedenle bu çalışmanın amacı hem paralel form için norm veriler elde etmek hem de paralel ve orijinal formlardan elde edilen verileri karşılaştırmaktır. Gereç ve Yöntem: Bu çalışmaya herhangi bir nörolojik ya da psikiyatrik hastalığı bulunmayan 50-84 yaşları arasında 179 kişi gönüllü olarak katılmıştır. Katılımcıların ön değerlendirmeleri, Standardize Mini-Mental Test ve Geriatrik Depresyon Ölçeği kullanılarak yapılmıştır ve Türkiye için belirlenen sınır değerlerin üzerinde puan alan kişiler çalışma kapsamına alınmıştır. Bulgular: Orijinal ve paralel formlardan elde edilen ortalama skorlar, testler iki haftalık aralıklarla uygulandığında birbirine oldukça yakın bulunmuştur. Yapılan korelasyon analizi sonuçlarına göre, tesadüfi hatırlama, edinim ve gecikmiş geri çağırma alt testleri arasında anlamlı korelasyon bulunmuştur. Aralarında anlamlı korelasyon bulunmayan kopyalama ve tanıma alt testlerine ait sonuçlar için skorların sıklık grafikleri ayrıca verilmiştir. Sonuç: Gözlenen değerler, Üç Kelime-Üç Şekil testinin her iki formunun da paralel olarak güvenilir bir şekilde kullanılabileceğini göstermektedir. Anahtar Kelimeler: Üç Kelime-Üç Şekil testi, nöropsikolojik test, Alzheimer, yaşlı Objective: The Three Words-Three Shapes test is a moderately difficult memory and learning test, which is very suitable for use in clinical applications. It allows the evaluation of both verbal and non-verbal materials in the same modality. Because neuropsychological evaluations may be repeated with certain intervals to follow a patient's progress, in situations where the progress of particularly degenerative diseases (e.g., Alzheimer or Parkinson-type dementia, primary progressive aphasia) need to be followed up, a parallel form of the test must be employed. Although normative data can be found for the original form of the test, the absence of data about the equivalency of its parallel form reduces the reliability of the test. Therefore, the aims of this study were to obtain normative data on the parallel form and compare the data on the parallel and original forms. Materials and Methods: One hundred seventy-nine participants aged 50 to 84 years with no neurologic or psychiatric disorders were included in the study. Pre-evaluations of potential participants were performed using the Standardized Mini-Mental State Examination and Geriatric Depression Scale, and the individuals who scored above the cutoff points set for Turkey ...

Music perception has a long and distinguished history as a topic of psychological research because music requires a mental activity in humans. As a complex human activity, music perception is naturally an area of interest especially to cognitive psychology. Cognitive studies suggest that listener's experience of a particular musical sequence is driven and at the same time constrained by the sounds registered by auditory mechanisms but also processed by available mental resources. This assumption indicates that researchers must take into account certain inherent limitations and capabilities of the listener. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss possible cognitive processes underlying music perception. The steps taken towards this purpose will be describing the structure of music and discussing the way that this structure is perceived by human cognition.

Visual context processing was investigated in both action video game players and nonplayers using the Ebbinghaus illusion task (N = 312, 39.4% female) in a cross‐sectional study design. When presented in context, players showed markedly poorer target size discrimination accuracy compared with nonplayers in the 6‐, 7‐, 8‐, and 9‐years old age groups, but this difference was reduced in 10‐years old group and diminished in adults. When presented in isolation (no‐context), the two groups displayed similar performance in all age groups. Furthermore, nonplayers (linear) and players (bell curve) showed profoundly different age‐related differences in context processing. These findings provide evidence that players might have enhanced perceptual bias to process visual context in the transition from early childhood to early adolescence, and the differences between the two groups start at early ages and continue with distinct developmental profiles.